Neil Young’s Next Project is a Science Fiction Novel

It's not his first venture outside of music

Neil Young
Neil Young and Adam Sandler perform as part of the 23rd Annual Bridge School Benefit at Shoreline Amphitheatre on October 25, 2009 in Mountain View California.
Tim Mosenfelder/Corbis via Getty Images

Neil Young is a talented guitarist and a fantastic songwriter, but that’s far from the extent of his creative abilities. His work as a filmmaker has been cited as an influence by none other than Paul Thomas Anderson, for one thing. And his 2003 album Greendale has also been turned into a film and a graphic novel. All of this is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that the news that Young is working on a science fiction novel is far less surprising than hearing that one of his peers was doing the same.

Literary Hub’s Walker Caplan has more on the news, which Young first revealed on his blog. There, Young shared that the novel’s title is Canary and its genre is science fiction. As Caplan mentioned in the article, Young has spoken about this novel in interviews, sharing that it’s about an employee of a power company who discovers an unsettling secret about the company’s technology.

Other than the fact that Young has turned in a draft to his editor, there’s very else we know about this novel. But Young is far from the only high-profile musician to make a foray into science fiction as of late. Next year will see the publication of Janelle Monae’s The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, while in 2019, clipping.’s music became the basis for Rivers Solomon’s excellent novel The Deep. Could the science fiction section of your local bookstore one day look like the lineup of an excellent music festival? It just might.

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